As I read through Michael Joyce’s hypertext fiction entitled “Afternoon”, I came across one central motif in several of the pages: love. The story I read began with the narrator’s conversation with a younger, cynical friend named Wert. The initial series of pages revealed him as a callous husband, constantly admonishing his wife Lolly. With each belittling comment, Wert would watch to see if the narrator chuckled along with him. However, our protagonist appeared to disagree with Wert’s jealous nature, and refused to participate. Through their conversation, the story reveals that the narrator is/was romantically involved with Lolly’s friend, Nausicaa. Later, the story provides brief narratives that describe the inception of their relationship with one another. Each fragment of the narrative is tied to the rest in some shape or form. On one page the narrator identified the relationship between the quartet of characters as something that “was messy. When Nausicaa left her husband, Wert hired her. And so, on the one hand, he felt some mystical and lofty attachment to her, as if she were linked to him through Lolly. It was a loyalty almost like incest, flesh of his wife’s flesh. Although she was my age, nearly old enough to be Wert’s mother she said, I think sometimes he thought of her as his daughter.” This particular excerpt not only reveals the tension among the characters, but also speaks on the nature of love and the different emotional needs each character has. The narrator and Wert both express a certain longing to connect, though they express this in very different ways. Wert talks with distance, as if he is afraid to expose his vulnerability. The narrator is also somewhat guarded, but more in the way of a man who is either afraid of losing or has already lost something dear to him. The narrator continues to describe Wert’s subconscious relationship with Nausicaa: “On the other hand, [Wert] wanted [Nausicaa] for himself, as if in some dim way he and Lolly contended for her love. Thus when I began to see her, he was at the same time both jealous of us all and certain that we each knew secrets kept from him.” If one diagramed the relationship of the four characters, they would find that Nausicaa would be the central node. She is the narrator’s object of love, Lolly’s intimate and sensitive companion, and Wert’s object of desire (whether this be emotional or physical desire). It is in this mapping that one can assume Nausicaa to be at the center of “Afternoon, A Story.” She represents the dangers of love -from acting as a subtle temptation to our narrator during their first “afternoon meetings”, to acting as the heartbreaking woman whom the narrator cannot keep. The moment of realization of the failure of the relationship is expressed by our narrator in one page where he states, “I thought some idea of culture would keep her when I couldn’t any longer. [But lectures and orchestras couldn’t replace talk.] You see the flaw, of course. It was neither my task to keep her, nor to think she could grow by my wishing.” This statement alone illustrates the ambiguous relationship between free will and love. Ultimately, the narrator had to accept that Nausicaa could choose to leave the relationship just as she chose to enter it so long ago.
Another piece of the narrative that struck me was the author’s own interjection through the voice of his protagonist. On one page he used the voice of his narrator to write, “I’m not sure that I have a story. And, if I do, I’m not sure that everything isn’t my story, or that, whatever is my story, is anything more than pieces of other’s stories.” This statement captures the complexity of narrative, that it is a construction made up by multiple authors, in a way. Within “Afternoon”, the narrator is writing his own story. But the entirety of it is not just his story. Rather, it is also composed using the stories of others (such as Wert and Nausicaa). In some sort of abstract preface to this statement, Joyce also interjected his interpretation of a Tolstoy quote, ” There isn’t any story here. It’s as Tolstoy said, the genuine drama occurs on the upward or downward slopes, never at the apex.” The human drama in “Afternoon” is captured by the moments of struggle, promise, and downfall. Because the interactive novel resists closure, there are no moments of victory or absolute failure that would risk stabilizing the “genuine drama” of the piece.